Maude Guirault is designer, student-researcher and artist at the Ateliers Vauban – the artists’ studios of Besançon. Having graduated with a DNSEP from ESAD Le Mans in 2021, followed by a Master’s degree from the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2023, her practise is at the cross of computational, textile and material design. Poetic and transdisciplinary, this practise combines traditional craftsmanship, robotics and scientific protocols. As designer and young researcher, she explores existing or potential areas of permeability between these fields by combining the aesthetic, mechanical and symbolic properties of materials and shapes.

Maude taught for several years at the ESAD in Le Mans, before spending nearly two years as engineer and manager of a technologic platform specialised in robotics at the Femto-ST research Institute.

She has been invited to present her work in several artistic and/or research contexts: En Souplesse seminar (Paris, 2025), Centre Culturel Canadien (Paris, 2025), Journée de l’IA dans les métiers d’art et du design (Besançon, 2025), Ateliers Vauban’s galery (Besançon, 2025), Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris, 2025), 10th Technology School of the CNRS Mechanics Network (Port-Barcarès, 2025), Jeudis de la Recherche webinar (2025), Summer School – soft robotics (Lille, 2024), Designers’ Days (Paris, 2024), International Day of the artistic practise of embroidery craft (Malicorne-sur-Sarthe, 2024), Hangar Y (Meudon-la-Forêt, 2023), Journées européennes du patrimoine (Paris, 2023), Paris Design Week (Paris, 2023), London Design Biennale (Londres, 2023). Furthermore, Maude has collaborated on the design and creation of artworks by other artists, such as Intimations of Shanshui, a Vivian Wang artpiece commissioned and subsequently exhibited by the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and RÉESPIRATION, an artistic installation by Samuel Bianchini, commissioned by researchers at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, coordination: Société des Nouveaux Commanditaires, with mediation by the 3CA association.

Since February 2026, she has been pursuing a practice-based CIFRE PhD in design, in collaboration with EnsadLab, the Laboratory of Physics and Mechanics of Heterogeneous Media at ESPCI, and the Atelier Montex. She is affiliated with the Reflective Interaction and Soft Matters groups at EnsadLab, as well as the Mécawet team at the PMMH. This practice-based phD project aims, first and foremost, to design and test custom-made embroidered clothing for deformable objects within the field known internationally as ‘soft robotics’.